Summary

This past week, our team was focused on preparing for our Halves presentation, but we also conducted another playtest. Putting together our halves presentation of our game progress was a lot of work, but it has been very beneficial. Explaining the gameplay and our specific goals to someone who has no idea what our project is about has helped solidify our direction and plan our next steps. I think doing something like this sooner could be helpful to move projects forward in the future.

Playtesting

We focused on the matching game mechanic with our paper prototype for this playtest, and it went surprisingly well. The playtesters worked together to match each item to the specific person and they seemed to really understand the game and what we were trying to achieve. We are looking forward to seeing how the matching will go once we have all of the items added to the environment and to see how/if they will work together. When the testers were asked their thoughts about the game overall, they agreed that they thought it was fun, so although a lot more testing needs to be done, I feel like we are on the right track.

Art

This week we kept our current idea and moved forwards with focusing on production this week. We decided to make the 4 questions in the first level to be animals, snacks, drinks and seasons. We made several versions of game items to test the mechanics in playtests. We made some abstract and fun items such as “a flying super dog” in the animal sections, but the feedback from playtest was saying these items are too abstract and takes a very long time to read and understand. Then our team redesign the items to make each one very straightforward and easy to understand, such as simply just “cat” and “dog”. This process of testing helps us to settle down our art style to be clear and also interesting in the meanwhile.

The character design was also put together this week. We are continuing with the fun and cute style.

Design

This week we brought our current herding paper prototypes to the design collective workshop. It went pretty well and the playtesters were all happy with the experience of herding. Besides, we also analyze a survey for our target audience to see what their most comfortable questions are among a lot of questions. For the wireframes, we are planning to adjust the current vertical ones to horizontal wireframes in the future development. 

We also put together a questionnaire to get feedback on how comfortable people were about answering certain questions. We then used this to help determine which questions we should move forward with in our testing. We first eliminated any questions that were a 1 or 2 and then found the ones that had a 4 or 5. As the weeks progress, our goal is to keep narrowing down our questions until we feel they produce the best conversations, but also help the students to bond.

Tech

• We have discussed potential platform changes to make the game more interactive, and make it easier for players to connect with each other.
• We have figured out a plan for the tech progress timeline for the next two weeks
• We have also designed several maps for further prototyping and
•  playtest.
• We have implemented the 8 sides movement
• We have sync the game as multiplayers
• We have set up the delicate server

Next Steps

Since next week is spring break and then GDC is soon after, we made sure to sit down as a team to discuss our goals in the coming weeks and to make a plan. We wanted to make sure that we are on the same page and that everyone feels confident in our direction and has a clear idea of what we wanna do after spring break.